Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  Eileen Power and H. G. Wells, 1930s

  Wells was not the only writer at this time who looked to the past as a means of interpreting – and coming to terms with – the present political instability. In the years following the Armistice, a gradual stream of publications exposed the betrayal of the heroic ideals for which soldiers had thought they were fighting. Novels such as Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, memoirs including Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth and Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, and R. C. Sherriff’s hugely popular trench drama Journey’s End emphasised the incongruity in encouraging enmity along national lines, and the meaninglessness of patriotic sacrifice. The Victorian certainty that Western civilisation was progressing towards a pinnacle of invincibility now seemed catastrophically misjudged. As peace movements looked to the future, historians looked to the past, for roots, messages and warnings. While Oswald Spengler’s 1918 history The Decline of the West argued gloomily that all civilisations follow predetermined patterns and that the West was now on the precipice of its own inevitable decline, Arnold Toynbee’s bestselling A Study of History (1934) proposed that historical destiny lay in individuals’ moral choices, and suggested that a new international order, based on collective security, could prevent the downfall Spengler had predicted. Toynbee, like Wells, was a friend of Power’s, and she followed his work closely; she too wanted to offer new narratives about the past, but ones which would draw connections between splintered nations and forge consolation and friendship. After Medieval People, her thinking took a distinctly pacifist stance, shifting from social history dwelling on personalities towards comparative, international history exemplifying the values that propelled the new League of Nations, and which seemed the world’s best hope for preventing the horror of another war.

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  ‘If the League of Nations is ever to become real,’ wrote Power, ‘children must leave school with some idea of the community to which they belong – mankind.’ Education was a crucial aspect of the LNU’s work; its council agreed that a single, coherent body of knowledge shared between children of different nations, emphasising cultural similarities and ‘peaceful interdependence’, could combat the climate of suspicion and mistrust that had led to the First World War. The LNU’s efforts to change the school curriculum were among its most successful ventures: members lobbied the Board of Education for the revision of textbooks along internationalist lines, drew up proposals to ban physical drills in schools alongside their campaigns for disarmament, and dispatched children to international summer schools at the League’s headquarters in Geneva. Power, too, considered it ‘no less imperative a duty to awaken a sense of international solidarity’ in children as in adults. She personally fought for the annual celebration of Empire Day – a holiday that had been marked in British schools since 1904, with parades and dressing-up – to be complemented by a ‘Humanity Day’, which she envisioned as a festival teaching children about achievements in science and culture instead of in war. She joined H. G. Wells in protest against ‘the teaching of patriotic histories that sustain and carry on the poisonous war-making tradition of the past’, and proposed that teachers should focus not on kings, wars and political skirmishes, which present other countries as enemy or ally, but on the many activities which have connected nations, such as trade, travel, literature, agriculture and religion. Her aim – which she reiterated in numerous articles and speeches throughout her career – was to teach history ‘so as to widen instead of to narrow sympathies’, instilling in students an essential sense of community beyond their own class or nation. Around this time, several of Power’s male friends – Gaitskell, Dalton, Tawney – were standing for office, seeking political influence as a means to changing minds. Power was no less ambitious, but took a different approach – more self-effacing, less likely to lead to fame and fortune, but grounded in firm principles. History, she insisted, ‘is one of the most powerful cements known in welding the solidarity of any social group … If we can enlarge the sense of group solidarity and use history to show the child that humanity in general has a common story, and that everyone is a member of two countries, his own and the world, we shall be educating him for world citizenship.’

  Power’s determination to disseminate her message as widely as possible found a productive outlet in modern technology. In 1924, the BBC established a series of educational radio broadcasts, enabling expert voices and fresh perspectives to be transmitted directly into living rooms and classrooms across the country. By 1927, three thousand schools were making use of the daily programmes. That same year its director, Lord Reith, hired Power’s good friend Hilda Matheson to become the BBC’s first Director of Talks. Matheson (formerly political secretary to Nancy Astor, the first woman in Britain to take a seat in Parliament) expressed an ‘active desire to promote the international spirit’ through her platform; she commissioned speakers including Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Rebecca West and Vita Sackville-West (with whom she had a long affair, sending Woolf into fits of jealousy) to speak on topics which regularly outraged the right-wing press. In 1929, Matheson confessed to Power her desire to secure an appearance from H. G. Wells, who had refused invitations to broadcast due to the BBC’s initial censorship of talks on politically sensitive subjects. Power accepted the challenge with glee. That June, Matheson, Wells and Bertrand Russell were guests at a specially convened tea party at 20 Mecklenburgh Square, where – in a twist beyond contrivance – Wells accidentally left with Matheson’s purse and Russell had to lend her money for her bus fare home. In the ensuing correspondence, Matheson charmed Wells into submission (‘It is fun to address twelve million or so British Islanders and some dozens of millions of Europeans all in one breath – I do assure you it is’). On 10 July – after a celebratory dinner at the Savoy Grill attended by Power and the Woolfs, among others – he delivered an impassioned address (which prompted several letters of complaint), denouncing nationalism and calling for world peace, and urging the cessation of patriotic teaching in schools. ‘I’m so pleased you snared H. G.,’ wrote Power to Matheson in triumph.

  But Power’s own involvement with the BBC was preceded by that of her younger sister. Eileen had always felt responsible for her sisters, Beryl, a highly respected civil servant in the Ministry of Labour, and Rhoda, another intrepid traveller with a passion for children’s education; in part, it was the duty she felt to provide financially for their futures that drove her commitment to her work, taking on extra lecturing and research jobs throughout her years at Girton and the LSE. The Power sisters were a close and formidable trio, and Rhoda’s story is no less fascinating than Eileen’s. After studying history at the University of St Andrews, she had travelled to Russia as a governess, where she witnessed the October Revolution – spending seven weeks hiding from soldiers in a cattle shed – then lived for two years in Palestine, editing a newspaper printed in Arabic, Hebrew and English. When she returned to England, she came to join Eileen at 20 Mecklenburgh Square. There, the sisters collaborated on a series of history books for children, starting with Boys and Girls of History (1926), a sort of children’s equivalent to Medieval People, and began to put together a world history textbook which they hoped would be taken up by schools. In 1927, Rhoda was invited to present a series of BBC broadcasts on ‘Boys and Girls of Other Days’. Helped by Eileen, who checked her scripts for historical accuracy, Rhoda came up with a novel presentation style, enhancing her talks with period music, interludes of dramatised dialogue and varied sound effects. The exceptionally vivid, immersive format – focused on conveying the human interest of her subject – proved instantly successful with children and adults alike. She began touring the country to address teachers on pedagogical technique, and her employment at the BBC was soon extended to a staff position. Her fame was such that her face appeared (unauthorised) on a cigarette card, to the amusement of her sisters. A director from America’s National Broadcasting Company, based in New York’s Rockefeller Plaza, wrote to congratula
te Rhoda on creating ‘one of the most effective means of education which has yet come to my attention’.

  Recording one of Rhoda Power’s history lessons, 1931

  Eileen Power made her first broadcast in 1928, on ‘Europe Throughout the Ages’. Across the 1930s she broadcast regularly to schoolchildren aged thirteen and over. (She refused to adapt her work for younger children as she wanted to be sure that ‘some definite lessons could be absorbed from it’.) Together she and Rhoda presented a World History series, planning the episodes late at night around the dining table in Mecklenburgh Square, after days spent shuttling between the house and the British Museum Reading Room. Eileen would prepare the lessons while Rhoda arranged the dramatic interludes; in partnership they produced a pamphlet with exercises and suggestions for the teacher to follow up, blackboard notes and bibliographies, and accompanying articles for the Radio Times and the Listener. Power’s own courses covered international history, from ancient times – Babylon, Egypt, Rome – to the present day, with the First World War and the Russian Revolution, and ending on the establishment and work of the League of Nations. Her broadcasts were her form of peace activism, and the political import of her messages was never diluted for her young audiences, nor did she ever compromise on her political convictions. She wrote in fury to Mary Somerville of the Schools Broadcasting department over the insertion of a picture entitled ‘Bolivar and his Generals discussing the Campaign of the Andes’ in a World History pamphlet: ‘It is, as you know, entirely against my principles to concentrate attention on wars in the World History course.’ She refused to broadcast on British history in isolation: ‘It seems to me an essential purpose of history teaching in schools to explain his wider as well as his narrower environment to the child, who is a future citizen of the world as well as of Britain.’ Her words recall Jane Harrison, who wrote in 1914 that she and like-minded people ‘aspired to be citizens … of the world’, convinced that any other mindset would lead to schism and war. Instead, Power proposed a course on the history of China, with an emphasis on ‘the common contribution of all peoples to world civilisation, and the increasing interaction of East and West from the beginning’.

  These stances were characteristic of Power’s commitment to a new sort of history. And at the LSE, her academic work developed in a similar direction. She began to research the rise of sovereign states at the end of the fifteenth century, examining the development of nationalism in the context of a contemporary Europe increasingly rife with aggression. After the Wall Street Crash of 1929 plunged the world into an international economic crisis, panic swept Europe: in Britain, Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts prowled past hunger marches and dole queues, while across the continent arose factions promoting a bloodthirsty military impulse and mounting enthusiasm for another war. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler assumed office as chancellor of Germany, and withdrew the country from the League of Nations. Over subsequent months, bars, clubs and meeting places closed, and books were burned in front of the Berlin State Opera to tannoys of Joseph Goebbels’s voice calling for a purely national literature. William Beveridge and Lionel Robbins were in Vienna that April, and saw in the evening paper the news that Nazis had ordered the dismissal of several Jewish academics from their universities – the beginning of an extended expulsion of Jewish scholars from Germany. On his return to the LSE, Beveridge called a staff meeting to discuss this ‘serious attack upon the whole principles of academic and scientific freedom of thought’. At once, seeing a chance to transform empathy into action, Power proposed a motion to establish an initiative at the college to make it ‘financially possible for university teachers who have lost their posts for reasons of race, religion, or political opinion, to continue their scientific work’. Within a fortnight, the Academic Freedom Committee had invited displaced scholars to the LSE as visiting lecturers, funded by grants to which LSE staff donated a percentage of their salaries. That October, Beveridge spoke alongside Albert Einstein, himself a refugee from Germany, at a fundraising gala at the Albert Hall, broadcast live on the BBC. Einstein’s speech was a stirring call for thinkers to unite across borders and speak up against fascism: ‘If we want to resist the powers which threaten to suppress intellectual and individual freedom we must keep clearly before us what is at stake, and what we owe to that freedom which our ancestors have won for us after hard struggles … It is only men who are free who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worthwhile.’

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  But the rise of nationalist aggression – and its threat to the League of Nations’s vision of world unity – was not restricted to European power politics. In September 1931, Japanese forces invaded Manchuria, a region of north-eastern China. By March 1932 they controlled Manchuria and Shanghai under a puppet government, renaming the area Manchukuo. Eileen Power, along with Harold Laski, R. H. Tawney and Leonard Woolf, signed a letter in the Spectator urging Britain to defend international order and ensure that the Covenant of the League of Nations be upheld: ‘If, in the case of a really serious issue between two Great Powers, this system fails, the peace of the world will be imperilled, and belief in the validity of collective treaties will have been undermined.’ But Japan refused to hand back the territory, and on 27 March 1933 it gave formal notice of its withdrawal from the League of Nations.

  Eileen Power’s fascination with China and its culture remained undimmed since the two months she had spent there in the spring of 1921. She dressed regularly in traditional embroidered gowns she had bought on her travels, and she focused much of her own research – as she had predicted at the end of her Kahn Fellowship – on the ancient trade routes between China and Europe, seeking out examples of collaboration, religious tolerance and shared scholarship. Her work derived in part from an abiding dislike of the British Empire, and by extension of the Western imperial impulse, feelings which had only intensified since her fellowship. She had been irate at the way the Versailles Treaty calmly apportioned Muslim countries to dominant European powers, and was certain that this attempt to keep the East in subjection would lead to deep resentment and future conflict. She saw this attitude reflected in conventional narratives of history, and dedicated much energy to exposing the dangers of writing without an awareness of perspective and context. In an excoriating review (entitled ‘The Story of Half Mankind’) of Hendrik van Loon’s 1921 book The Story of Mankind, which left out the Mughals in favour of the Tudors, and included a diagram showing the ‘centre of civilisation’ moving westward, Power set out the principles behind her own conception of world history. Picking up on the tendency in textbooks to provide ‘an adequate account of the ancient empires of the Middle East, after which they subside into a history of Western civilisation’, Power argued that portraying the modern East ‘merely as a barbaric force, which the West was obliged from time to time to hurl back’ is ‘not only false to history, but dangerous. In the world into which his young readers are born, one of the most pressing problems is that of the relations of East and West … Only by a mutual understanding can the heirs of the great civilisations which were born in India, China and the Mediterranean basin live together today, for only the mutual respect born of knowledge and understanding can save a clash, in which all may perish.’

  Power’s enduring interest in China stood against the fear of ‘Yellow Peril’ which had swept Britain since the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century: the belief that China and the Chinese presented a danger to Western supremacy. In popular discourse, China was exotic and backward, seductive yet dangerous; Kipling’s dictum that ‘East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet’ was regularly, lazily quoted to characterise a fundamental social gulf. Large Chinese communities existed in London, particularly congregated in crowded boarding houses in Limehouse, but their presence was met with disdain and, regularly, violence: twice in the 1920s the Home Office sent immigration inspectors to all Chinese homes in Britain, in the clear hope of making evictions, while the press regularly accused Chines
e-owned shops, laundries and restaurants of drug-trafficking. In the late 1920s, a public hysteria around mixed-race relationships – ‘White girls hypnotised by yellow men’, screamed one tabloid headline – left the Chinese immigrant community vulnerable to abuse by commentators who associated them with a sexual threat and the collapse of imperial hierarchy.

  Among artistic circles there flourished a wide-ranging – if often just as exoticising – appreciation of chinoiserie. Ezra Pound, calling on the modern artist to ‘make it new’, was creatively translating classical Chinese poetry, while in 1912 the British Museum had established its first Department of Oriental Prints and Drawings, run by Laurence Binyon, a close friend of H. D. and Aldington. Over the course of the 1930s, horror at Japan’s ongoing military occupation of China prompted new British interest in Chinese culture. In November 1934, Power lent her embroidered costumes to the Little Theatre (where Dorothy L. Sayers had enjoyed the Grand Guignol a decade earlier) for a production of the play Lady Precious Stream, by Hsiung Shih-I, a friend of George Bernard Shaw. The play ran for one thousand nights, transferred to the West End and Broadway, and was attended by royalty, celebrities and several prime ministers. In 1935, the Royal Academy held the largest exhibition of Chinese art ever before shown, attended by over four hundred thousand visitors. (Virginia Woolf went twice.) Almost a thousand objects – bronze, jade, lacquer carvings, porcelain and paintings, many of which had been in storage since the outbreak of war with Japan – were loaned from museums and collections in China, and shipped to Britain by the Royal Navy. The Chinese government hoped the exhibition would draw attention to China’s situation, and garner appreciation for its culture and history; Power was eager to support such initiatives of cultural collaboration, aware that public support was essential to alleviating China’s present plight.